Psychedelics
May 16, 2026
Tam Martin Fowles, Tehseen Noorani
We take a wide view across the emerging research into psychedelics and psychosis/madness, to emphasize the need for not just more but also wise research at these intersections. We note the growing rate of publications on the use of psychedelics by people who have had experiences of psychosis/madness, and make our arguments around a narrative report of the lead author, who experienced a...
Neuropharmacology
December 1, 2025
Carina Joy Donegan, Dimitri Daldegan-Bueno, Tehseen Noorani et al.
4 citations
Expectations can impact antidepressant treatment and psychedelic therapy, often enhancing placebo effects and influencing outcomes. However, research in this context is lacking. Our study explored the expectations of participants with major depressive disorder (MDD) before microdosing lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in an open-label trial. Twenty-three individuals with MDD completed a...
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
November 10, 2025
Robin J Murphy, Mia Wardlaw, Thomas A. Smith et al.
Microdosing psychedelics is an increasingly popular phenomenon where small amounts of psychedelic drugs are taken regularly. Qualitative data have been published regarding the experiences of microdosers, but never in the context of a randomised controlled trial. Semi-structured video interviews with 40 healthy males were conducted following a double-blind placebo-controlled trial of 10 µg of...
Biosocieties
October 4, 2025
Tehseen Noorani
Abstract The vexed ‘psychotomimetic model’ of psychedelics claims to offer insights into both psychedelic experiences and psychosis, by weaving across these sets of experiences. One enduring opposition to the model distinguishes between psychedelic experiences as voluntary or ‘willed’, and psychosis as an affliction to be endured. This opposition is useful for projects seeking to sanitise and...
Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology
September 1, 2025
Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Matthew J. Baggott, Eduardo Ekman Schenberg et al.
8 citations
Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) has typically been evaluated using conventional randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which assess treatment efficacy under highly controlled conditions. However, PAT constitutes a complex intervention, integrating pharmacological, psychotherapeutic and contextual elements that interact dynamically with patient experiences and healthcare settings. Conventional...
Nature Medicine
June 3, 2025
Chloé Pronovost-Morgan, Kyle T. Greenway, Leor Roseman et al.
26 citations
Psychedelic substances exhibit complex interactions with the 'set and setting' of use, that is, the mental state of the user and the environment in which a psychedelic experience takes place. Despite these contextual variables' known importance, psychedelic research has lacked methodological rigor in reporting extra-pharmacological factors. This study aimed to generate consensus-based...
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
May 16, 2025
Anna-Leigh Hodge, Anna Forsyth, Tehseen Noorani et al.
6 citations
Abstract Psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in certain fungi has long been used by Indigenous cultures within ritual and ceremony for healing and spiritual purposes (Spiers et al., 2024). While emerging evidence points to psychedelic agents being novel avenues for the treatment of substance use disorders, the predominantly Western medical models of psychedelic-assisted...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
April 17, 2025
Nathan H. Heller, Frederick S. Barrett, Tobias Buchborn et al.
3 citations
Abstract Background and Hypothesis Visual hallucinations (VH) are a core symptom of both Lewy body diseases (LBDs; eg, Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies) and serotonergic psychedelics (SPs; eg, psilocybin and mescaline). While these conditions differ in etiology, overlapping phenomenology, and neural mechanisms suggest shared pathways. This review explores similarities and...
Psychiatr Res Clin Pract
February 11, 2025
Jules Evans, Marc Aixalà, Brian T Anderson et al.
18 citations
Objective: This article outlines recommendations from 30 psychedelic researchers on how to create a better psychedelic safety net. Methods: A survey of 30 psychedelic researchers asked them to identify key critical research gaps around psychedelic harm and safety. Results: The critical research gaps identified by the authors included defining the main types of psychedelic harm, the predictors...
Front Psychol
August 21, 2024
Tehseen Noorani, Oliver Davis, Alex Dymock et al.
5 citations
Keywords: psychedelic experience, set and setting, context, culture, anthropotechnics, humanities, social science and humanities
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
May 27, 2024
Tehseen Noorani, R. Liebert
2 citations
With a surge in critiques levelled against the evidence generated by randomised controlled trials in the study of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), and the legalization of PAT in select jurisdictions such as Australia, and Oregon and Colorado in the United States, we consider what form the real-world evidence of its effects could take. Specifically, we propose to complement individual-level...
American Journal of Bioethics
May 2, 2024
Edward Jacobs, Brian D. Earp, Paul S. Appelbaum et al.
29 citations
The first Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelic Ethics (HOPE) workshop convened to discuss ethical matters relating to psychedelics in August 2023 at the University of Oxford.The organizers (BDE, DBY, EJ) aim...
Psychological Medicine
July 19, 2023
Tehseen Noorani, Gillinder Bedi, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy
49 citations
Abstract What happens when an emerging programme of medical research overlaps with a surging social movement? In this article we draw on the anthropological term ‘chemosociality’ to describe forms of sociality born of shared chemical exposure. Psychedelic administration in the context of recent clinical trials appears to have been particularly chemosocial in nature. We argue that one...
Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
December 1, 2022
Neşe Devenot, Aidan Seale-Feldman, Elyse Smith et al.
50 citations
While the literature on psychedelic medicine emphasizes the importance of set and setting alongside the quality of subjective drug effects for therapeutic efficacy, few scholars have explored the therapeutic frameworks that are used alongside psychedelics in the lab or in the clinic. Based on a narrative analysis of the treatment manual and post-session experience reports from a pilot study of...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
September 10, 2021
Tehseen Noorani, Jonny Martell
32 citations
The publication in April 2021 of the Imperial College London Phase II study investigating \nthe efficacy of psilocybin-assisted therapy vs. escitalopram for depression reported differences \nin the primary outcome measure (the QIDS-SR16) between experimental and control arms as \nstatistically insignificant (1). However, secondary measures of depression, and other relevant \nmeasures (see...
Philosophy, psychiatry & psychology
2021
Tehseen Noorani
68 citations
Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind]set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns...
Philosophy, psychiatry & psychology
2021
Tehseen Noorani
I'm grateful to the authors for their comments, and for the opportunity to respond. To clarify my approach, I sought to discuss the centrality of 'set and setting' at descriptive and normative levels in the Psychedelic Renaissance by focusing on the language of containment prevalent during my ethnographic research. Inspired by the study of material culture, I took up certain questions that can...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
August 5, 2020
Pantelis Leptourgos, Martin Fortier-Davy, Robin Carhart-Harris et al.
88 citations
Abstract The recent renaissance of psychedelic science has reignited interest in the similarity of drug-induced experiences to those more commonly observed in psychiatric contexts such as the schizophrenia-spectrum. This report from a multidisciplinary working group of the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research (ICHR) addresses this issue, putting special emphasis on hallucinatory...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
Tehseen Noorani, Ben Alderson-Day
8 citations
In 'REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Towards a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics', Carhart-Harris and Friston offer an important analysis of what the predictive processing framework has to offer our understanding of psychedelic experiences, providing an invaluable ground for psychedelic psychiatry. While applauding this, we encourage paying greater attention to contextual factors...
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
July 30, 2019
Tehseen Noorani
112 citations
This commentary considers efforts to turn psychedelics into medications that can be administered through healthcare systems as examples of “medicalization.” I draw on ethnographic research both inside and outside of university-based clinical trials from 2014 to date, together with analogous examples from psychiatry and drug research and development. Rather than taking a normative stance on...
New Writing
April 9, 2019
Tehseen Noorani
3 citations
ABSTRACT Science has caught wind of mysticism once again. Operationalising metrics from the writings of perennial philosophers, psychopharmacologists are using psychedelics in a laboratory context to reliably induce ‘mystical experiences’. These experiences are scored along such dimensions as unity, noesis, transcendence of space–time and ineffability. How are we to read this moment? I draw on...
Journal of Psychopharmacology
June 25, 2018
Tehseen Noorani, Albert Garcia‐romeu, Thomas Cody Swift et al.
285 citations
Background: Recent pilot trials suggest feasibility and potential efficacy of psychedelic-facilitated addiction treatment interventions. Fifteen participants completed a psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation pilot study between 2009 and 2015. Aims: The aims of this study were as follows: (1) to identify perceived mechanisms of change leading to smoking cessation in the pilot study; (2) to...
2017
Tehseen Noorani
3 citations
From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with a team of pharmacologists experimenting with psilocybin, an illegal psychoactive compound found in psychedelic mushrooms. The team had conducted an open-label clinical trial with long-term cigarette smokers, using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to help them quit. The smoking outcomes were very promising, occurring alongside...
Drug and Alcohol Dependence
November 1, 2015
Albert Garcia‐romeu, Tehseen Noorani, Roland R. Griffiths et al.
6 citations
Aims: We assessed long-term (>12 months) outcomes of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation, and qualitatively analyzed participants’ accounts to inform potential psychological mechanisms of treatment efficacy. Methods: Fifteen individuals who completed a pilot study of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation were invited for a long-term follow-up. Eleven (73%) returned and were interviewed...